| Chapter 39 | Chapter 41 |
Part V
40
Whack-a-mole
Gulf of Bothnia, September 11th, 2047
"Watch out! A Kong! Behind you!" Dakila shouted.
As Wietse turned around at Dakila's prompt, he just picked up the contours of the red semi-trailer coming towards him through the air at incredible speed, before the huge black M-Brane-fold entry sphere grew large enough to obscure it. As Wietse took a step back, his head almost touched the expanding sphere just before it's growth came to an end and the sphere collapsed back into nothingness and the semi-trailer had disappeared with it. Phew, that was a close one.
"Thanks, kid, I owe you one. Guess I should have taken you up on that back-to-back thing before."
Just as Wietse spotted the medium sized 'Kong' Jötnar that had thrown the semi-trailer, the Kong dropped into another M-Brane-fold sphere created by Dakila.
Dakila had been a quick study. Much quicker to adapt to the PUPR brain implant than he himself had been. Dakila and Wietse had been arguing about tactics before the battle. Wietse's proposal had been to keep jumping around the battlefield. Assess the situation, pick one Jötnar, drop-sphere it half a kilometre high, then trust mission central to pick the next tactical position. Never in the same spot twice and never anywhere for longer than fifty seconds. Dakila's proposal was a bit different: Fight back-to-back, lure in the packs of smaller Jötnar and stand your ground as long as possible, then jump to a position behind the approaching pack and continue. After a short discussion, Dakila had agreed to Wietse's strategy, but now it seemed it might be time to rethink that choice. Fifty seconds might be enough for fighting off the solitary huge whino type Jötnar and for fighting the small groups of nasty but highly-predictable smaller Jötnar that Dakila and Wietse hadn't bothered to name. These fifty seconds now didn't seem all that short, nor all that safe, when factoring in the presence of the medium sized 'Kong' Jötnar.
Wietse had felt awfully silly at first, wearing a long blue coat but most of all he had felt utterly ridiculous wearing the large pointy blue wizard's hat. The attacking forces clearly didn't care one way or the other. And that to Wietse strangely came as something of a relief. But now, after fighting alongside Dakila who was wearing an equally silly cosplay attire for the twenty-or-so minutes their frozen-sea-surface fight had been going on, Wietse started to feel there was an upside to the two of them being dressed up like fairy-tale wizards. Wietse started to feel the part and in that, he grew more and more confident in his role as the Quantum Wizard.
While for him as an old man it had taken quite some time to grow into his role, for Dakila it seemed all of this magical cosplay had come naturally from the first minute and had been a great stimulus for his performance as an M-Brane warrior.
There was a whole team of augmented nerds working in the background using a small network of micro folds for communication. While these nerds would have been utterly useless in the field, the work they were doing behind the scenes had been indispensable.
Wietse's idea of letting the Jötnar plummet to their deaths had not worked out. Wietse had made the same mistake that the Sami armed forces had made regarding these Jötnar giants. Falling from the sky from a height of several kilometres didn't even seem to bother them. They just got up and resumed their attacks as if nothing had happened.
The different-sized but always scaringly-huge hominids were unarmed. A fact that had made the Sami Republic's defense forces greatly underestimate the threat posed by these monstrous beings. The biggest of them were the most human-like. Apart from the fact that they stood at over forty metres tall, a rare one standing as high as sixty, and apart from their pale skin color and heads that were slightly too big for the size of their body, they looked pretty much human-like in stature. Their movement looked clumsy, like a drunk man trying to make his way home from the bar at four in the morning. While being the largest, this class of hominids had proven easiest to handle for Wietse, Dakila, and their grid-control backup crew. Despite their imperviousness to everything the Sami air force had managed to throw at them, all these huge Jötnar could dish out was the destruction of buildings they clumsily kicked against and grabbing at aircraft that came too close to them. The Sami Republic still had an old school air force with manned airplanes, as drone swarms were not that practical to handle in deep winter.
Other than their walking speed that never showed any sense of haste, the speed with which the largest type of giants launched out at passing military airplanes was tremendously fast and had cost the Sami forces almost ten percent of their air force, just in the first few minutes of the battle. Dakila had referred to this class of Jötnar as whinos and frankly, that was as good a name as any.
A second, smaller type of Jötnar was more apelike and far more vicious than the whinos. If it hadn't been for Dakila, one of these bastards would have just gotten the better of him. Its color and face shared the same unsettling characteristics as the first type. Their cat-like pupils in their iris-free white eyes, an eerily-human nose and wide mouth that when closed looked like a plastic surgery gone bad, but when opened the mouth went through a horrific transformation where it looked as if a human upper and lower jaw folded outwards into a baboon-like facial structure. Their extremities were different in proportions when compared to humans. Longer arms, shorter legs. Their stature looked like halfway between a human powerlifter and a silverback gorilla. Standing between eighteen and twenty metres tall, they were faster than the whinos. The thing that made them the most dangerous, though, was their ability to throw stuff, heavy stuff, basically anything they could get their hands on, with great accuracy and at high speed. Rocks, tree trunks, cars, large chunks of ice, the semi-trailer just now, that could have easily killed him. Dakila and Wietse really needed to have each other's backs with these Kongs as Dakilla had just proven to him.
The smallest type of Jötnar was the fastest. Other than the first two types, these Jötnar lacked any semblance of humans. Where the Kongs were like hybrids of humans and gorilla silverback males in stature, these runners were more like an albino hybrid between a silverback-gorilla and a hyena. When on occasion one of them stood on its hind legs, it would only reach four to six metres in height. But what it lacked in size it made up for in speed and agility. They ran on all fours most of the time. And boy did they move. Their speed was faster than that of a rally car and their agility was such that it was quite impossible to catch more than one Jötnar with a single sphere.
The longer the battle lasted, the more Wietse started to feel the dramatic power their clothes had on both him and his companion. Dakila had insisted on accessorizing before confronting the Jötnar, but dressing up like wizards wasn't exactly Wietse's cup of tea. At least this attire was warm enough to move around in this frozen hell. Minus thirty-seven degrees Celsius. The home base had determined the Jötnar didn't ever venture anywhere where the temperature exceeded minus thirty-two degrees Celcius. At the moment that meant they were still confined to the northern territories, and they clearly didn't have the same freedom he and Dakila had to materialize M-Brane-fold exit spheres just anywhere. A small group of Dakila's nerd-force had been analyzing Wietse's grid and had discovered intersection spots where his grid intersected with a much weaker but also much larger intergalactic grid. It was at one of these intersection spots, or pretty close to it, that exit spheres were dropping off Jötnar by the tens right now. The kid had been right, they needed to try his strategy now if they were to contain this exit cluster.
"Central! Get us new, more central coordinates, we are switching to the Kotu manoeuvre!"
They had tried this one only once. Dakila had come up with it after having been fitted with his cranial implant, and while it had worked, Wietse was a bit nervous about stepping into the sphere given their new timing constraints. Two entry spheres, one exit sphere. If the timing wasn't right, there was no telling what could happen. Exit spheres had to be short-lived here, as if they weren't they would act as an anchor for Jötnar exit spheres and the Jötnar would be on them in zero time. Yet, Dakila and Wietse couldn't pass through the same fold at the exact same time from different entry spheres either, or risk suffering the same fate that the New Zion agent had suffered with his leg. In fact, the leg could easily be something worse in their case, here, like half a body or even a head.
A silvery sphere materialized before Wietse. The spheres were much larger now than the ones Wietse had used before the battle, due to Dakila's silly wizard hats. Wearing a blue wizard's suit would have been awkward enough without the white stars of vilt stitched all over the coat and pointy hat. But then, at least the pointy hat actually served a purpose. Next to the fact that they made it easier for both Wietse and Dakila to work with tech from an organization they both despised, the fact that at these temperatures, the headgear provided at least some protection from the horrible cold, the silly looking things actually provided EMP protection. While the Jötnar didn't seem to have any tech at all, and it didn't appear they needed it either, the Sami armed forces had thrown everything at the Jötnar they could possibly throw at them, including EMP bombs. So without the silly hats, Both Wietse and Dakila would most likely have had their brains fried by friendly fire.
This was it, Wietse closed his eyes and stepped into the huge sphere in front of him at the second it changed from silvery to black.
"I hope this will work out, kid."
As Wietse stepped out of the exit sphere, relieved he was still in one piece, a young female voice spoke into his earpiece. It was Imelda, the way too young girlfriend of Dakila.
"Two steps back, gentlemen, you are dead center in the exit zone now, entry sphere coordinates set to Merlin's current positions plus one metre thirty-five."
Wietse took a step back, then carefully the second one. As he placed his right foot next to his left, Wietse heard the thin layer of snow that was on top of the frozen sea compress under Dakila's foot as well. There were three huge silvery exit spheres on different sides of Wietse. One right in front of him at a distance of about one hundred metres and at a height of about half that. A second one a bit closer at about ten o'clock. The third one was further out in the distance. Maybe four hundred metres away at about one o'clock. There were Jötnar everywhere, but none had spotted them. Their position was dead center alright. All the Jötnar were all moving away from Wietse.
"I've got two exits, Merlin, and one whino." Dakila spoke from behind him.
Wietse hated the nicknames, but it meant the world to Dakila. Dakila had acted almost like a little kid when Wietse told him he wouldn't mind being Merlin instead of Dakila's favorite wizard Gandalf. Had he known about the blue suit and the silly white stars, Wietse might have been a bit more hesitant about giving up Gandalf, but in the end, knowing how happy it ended up making Dakila, Wietse was glad he gave away his wizard name. A name that Dakila had made up for him in the first place.
"Three exits, high above the ground, Gandalf. Two whinos, one Kong and a stream of pack Jötnar coming out of an exit to my left. Central, are we go?"
"Exits are stable. We are go!" Imelda spoke as black spheres appeared below the silvery ones. Each entry-sphere matching the exit-sphere in size, each about half a sphere diameter below the first.
The stream of pack-Jötnar coming out of one of the exits went straight into the matched entry sphere now. After figuring out that a drop from large heights wasn't having any impact on the Jötnar, Wietse, Dakila and their team agreed to use the close-by debrisphere hot zone as dumping point for the Jötnar. If the vacuum of space wouldn't end them, surely an encounter with a HEOPS swarm would.
While the whino Jötnar wasn't going to be a threat to Wietse and Dakila any time soon, it took note of the new spheres immediately and started slowly stumbling towards their position, attracting the attention of many of the other Jötnar as it screeched and pointed at their position, and the other giants too started to move towards their position as well. Wietse immediately materialized a drop sphere for one of the two Kong Jötnar. Rather though than dropping completely through the entry-sphere, the white monster spread out his long arms and managed to grab hold of two large pieces of ice. In doing so, the beast managed to keep himself from dropping through the sphere completely. A sphere that did have its legs and most of the torso submerged now.
Then Wietse remembered the New Zion agent. Could it work? The Jötnar had proven to be virtually indestructible. Could an M-Brane fold snap this monster in two like it had the agent's leg? Well, time to find out. As the sphere shrank quickly, the Jötnar let go of his grasp of the ice rocks. Wietse made the sphere grow again and the Jötnar disappeared into it.
Then Wietse noticed a large block of ice coming towards him and while directing his staff at it, he made a new entry sphere appear. Wietse was really getting into his wizard part. While the staff was just a silly prop, using it as if it were a magical artifact felt appropriate somehow.
With some time to spare for the packs to come close enough, Wietse relaxed. The other Kong was the only remaining threat now for the coming minute, minute and a half. Wietse created a small viewing sphere. He had to know. Were the Jötnar killed by the vacuum of space? As he kept his eye on the second Kong, Wietse quickly glanced at the viewing sphere. The image he saw was disturbing. Not only was the first Kong still alive while being in two parts, a tiny torso with tiny legs was growing out of the upper part of the Jötnar, while a tiny head and minuscule hands were slowly growing bigger and bigger on top of the lower body of the creature. Not only did snapping the creature in two not kill it, it actually turned it into two Jötnar. As for the vacuum? Apparently, the vacuum of space had zero effect on it as well.
"Central! Move the exit spheres out of the hot zone! Repeat: move the exits out of the hot zone now! Loop configuration."
"What's up, Merlin?" a different, concerned-sounding female voice spoke through their earpieces.
"Don't question commands, follow them! Now!" Dakila snapped.
At that moment, another incoming piece of ice from the Kong that came hurtling towards Dakila. Quickly Dakila positioned another input sphere in its path.
"I've got an idea for an experiment, Gandalf. If this works, we might get the edge we need so badly now."
"Roger that, Merlin, all is clear on this side."
Wietse created another small viewing sphere. Then pointed his staff towards the remaining Kong, while creating a drop sphere beneath it. As the Kong dropped through the sphere, Wietse looked at the approaching pack of smaller Jötnar. Forty, maybe fifty seconds.
"Dakila, …. Err Gandalf, swap places!"
As Dakila and Wietse turned around toward each other, then passed each other, Wietse looked into the viewing sphere. The Kong was moving nervously across the sands as he visibly started to sweat due to the midday desert temperature. Then the Kong started moving in a completely erratic manner as if in agony. Suddenly the Kong lit up like a candle, then an explosion. Wietse averted his eye just in time as a hot gush of air came from his viewing sphere and scorched his beard.
"Twenty-one" Dakila spoke, "central manoeuvre?"
"Central!" Wietse acknowledged.
A split second after that, a new large entry sphere appeared one decimetre from Wietse. Wietse quickly touched Dakila's side to signal the sphere was ready.
"Now!" Dakila spoke, and while Wietse stepped forward and Dakila stepped backward they both disappeared into the sphere to emerge out of the exit sphere.
"Central, drop the new guys into the hottest part of the Sahara and get me the coordinates of an active volcano! Da …Gandalf, we need to make the Jötnar sweat, heat them up a bit, but no fire, no explosions, just hot air."
"Roger that, Merlin, we'll give them some dragon breath!"
| Chapter 39 | Chapter 41 |